Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Christmas Trees

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why Christmas trees are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Christmas trees, known for being pretty, famous for being needly. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Christmas trees are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my cohost, Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of Christmas trees?

I like Christmas. I'm not a religious person, but presents, trees and doors, food, cookies, deer, people breaking and entering through your chimney, sign me up. I like all of it As I think especially in the United States, we just all think Christmas is great. Like not everyone's Christian Yeah, some people are even just kind of vaguely culturally Christian and don't practice Some people are just not Christian at all. But everybody's like, yeah, the Christmas stuff's pretty good. It's cool

My well also, you know, it's like, so my Jewish dad is like the most Christmas. He's Mr. Christmas. He's super into Christmas. I think it's just fun stuff. And like the Christmas tree, having a tree indoors is just so delightfully naughty. Like, aha, the indoors is outdoors and outdoors is indoors. What is this? It's interesting because the whole like going to a Christmas tree lot, getting

a giant Christmas tree, putting it on the roof of your car, I'm realizing it's much more American than I had known. I just thought that was like a global thing of anyone who celebrated Christmas did that. But here in Italia, it is more common to either get a fake tree, like an artificial tree that's like smaller, a small live tree, especially when you're in sort of a more, if you're in sort of a city where you live like in a apartment,

I see a lot of people who have sort of artificial trees. One thing that I found, which this is what I did this year for our little Christmas display, is a tree fronds. So like not the whole tree, just like they trimmed fronds, not the whole tree. And then I got a few of them and like bundled them together, stuck them in like a basket upright and it looks like a little tree. And it's mine. Oh, I like that. And its name is John Christmas and I've put little ornaments on it. And I feel like Charles Brown. Yeah, although it's Italy, so it's Giovanni Christmas and you feel like Carlo Brown, I think?

Carlo Barone. Carlo Barone. Hey Snoopy, why? Snoopy, you're not an inventor. I don't know what that means. Yeah, I realized going into this, I have so many Christmas tree memories and feelings because my family growing up had the same artificial tree for my whole childhood. I really loved it.

And it was a really nice ritual, like putting the color coded wires of the branches into the central stock. It was awesome, actually. It was great. I had no idea that there was like, we would always get a real dead tree and put it in there. Pine needles got everywhere, it smells great. The artificial trees, I know they come in all sorts of different styles.

Like it came with like the lights already attached to it or was there like a assembly instructions where you would need to assemble the brigs into the right holes? Great question. So my childhood one, it's like a large tree and it was basically like a plastic central column with a bunch of sprockets for the branches to go into.

And then the branch is like a bent piece of metal and they just put a little bit of paint as a color coding on the wire, but it didn't have lights built into it. It was just the branches. It's like, this is the mid-tier branch. This is like the upper branch. Ah, that's fun.

It's a tree puzzle. I love puzzles. It's a tree puzzle. We loved putting it together. And then, and yeah. That's so sweet. I love that. And now me and Brenda have like a small artificial tree that does have lights baked into it. And it's just one piece from Target.

So you just put it out and you plug it in. You plug that tree straight into a wall. It juts out at a 90 degree angle. It's also moving around the wall like a Roomba. It's terrifying. Yeah, it's also moving around the wall like a Roomba. It's terrifying. And then I also helped my dad when we volunteered at the YMCA Christmas tree lot, where they sold living trees. And that was fun too. Me and a couple of the other boys gathered loose stumps and then tried to sell the stumps to people for our own benefit. And it was

like a funny bit that we did. It was very cute. You want to get a stump over here. We got premium stumps. You want a stump? You want a stump? There's so many possibilities with a stump, let me tell you. I'm pretty sure we sold one for a dollar one time to somebody who just thought it was funny. So it was great.

Yeah. Listen, listen. You don't need plates when you got stumps. Chairs, plates, candle holders. Yeah. A table for chipmunks, stumps. That's what you need. You need more stumps in your life.

Stumps are fun. Stumps are pretty good. I'd buy stumps from a bunch of kids selling them illegally probably. Yeah, it wasn't really allowed, but we went with it. Love that listeners picked this topic. Thank you to Decoupé, also Paul Garaventa and Josh the Speakman. Thank you so many people for suggesting this topic and giving us a holiday topic. We're going to lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week that's in a segment called, Oh, SIFPOD stats, oh, SIFPOD stats, your facts and stats enlighten. They educate on long commutes, their numbers songs are silly goofs.

Oh, stiff butt stats, oh, nice job. Yeah, just call me Puccino, that's not a name. I, call me Puccinelli. That was the fourth tether, he was kicked out for. Puccino, call me Botticelli. But I can paint you guys, so they're just pushing him out of the rehearsal space. That name was submitted by Takoop there. We have an Indian for this segment every week. Please make a Missillian Wacky and Bass possible.

Submit through Discord or to siffpotatgmail.com. First number this week is about eight years of use. About eight years. Yes. And that's a rough estimate of the tipping point where an artificial tree is more sustainable than annual living Christmas trees. There's all these weird sustainability calculations. I'm trying to move away from plastic in terms of things that I drink out of.

I'm obviously still using plastic for a lot of stuff because plastic is a super useful material, but like metal or glass water bottles take more energy to create. So they're, you know, more, less sustainable than plastic. But that's if you don't take into account that like after a few years, then it's like way more sustainable

than say a plastic bottle. Yes. Like you'd think like, well, planting trees is good for the environment. And it is, but it's really mostly good when you let trees age a lot more than they generally are allowed to for Christmas tree farms. Yeah. This turns out this is a loose estimate too. We don't really know the exact time amount.

I found ranges from 20 years down to five years for how long you need to reuse an artificial tree, mostly made of plastic usually for it to be more sustainable. But either way, that's the guidance is you can do a good thing by getting living trees and then having them composted or mulched or some other positive thing after you're done. Or you can get one artificial tree and use it hard. If you use it for many years, that's good. Have more than one Christmas a year. Use it throughout the year. Use the tree for different holidays. If it's 4th of July, put little American flags on it.

Arbor Day? I mean, come on. It's actually a big miss by all of us. Why are we not doing that? Come on. Right? Arbor Day. It just makes a lot of sense.

It makes a lot of sense. People. I guess the living tree users don't want to chop down a tree for Arbor birthday, but us artificial tree people could just put it back up for sure. There you go. There you go. That's why it's not a tradition, but it should be. Yeah. Yeah.

Valentine's Day, we're having dinner under the tree. We're both crawling under the tree where the presents go for romance. Easter, eggs in a tree. Let's see what it's Halloween spooky tree with little bones in it. Put bones in a tree. Let's see, what is Halloween? Spooky tree with little bones in it. Put bones in that tree. I've run out of holidays that I can, St. Patrick's Day. Trees already green, perfect. Leprechauns in the tree.

It's an Irish elf, basically. Yeah, elf in the shelf is almost a leprechaun. You just gotta switch his little outfit. He needs a pot of gold, that's basically it. Yeah. Yeah, and the source for this estimate of eight years is the New York Times. In 2023, they interviewed a bunch of experts about this annual question. Bill Lindberg, a horticulture expert at Michigan State University said that because artificial

trees end up in a landfill, you need to use them a lot for it to be good. But then once you use them a lot, it is sustainable. And yeah, I'm also gonna link to Atlas Obscura. They have photos of Christmas tree reuse at a park called Fort Macon State Park on the coast of North Carolina, where every year they stick thousands of used Christmas trees into the beach point down,

which helps prevent soil erosion. Like if you go in the winter, you just see a bunch of Christmas trees sticking up. Are these artificial Christmas trees or real dead ones? Oh, I switched to talking about living Christmas trees. That was confusing. Yeah. Okay, got it. So they put living dead, the living dead Christmas trees sprouting out of the ground. Woo, spooky. Okay, so they take your old dead Christmas trees sprouting out of the ground. Woo, spooky. Okay, so they take your old dead Christmas tree, stick it into the ground to prevent erosion. That's very cool.

Yeah, and a bunch of communities compost these or mulch these or do some other positive stacking of the wood and the branches because it's a usable resource. Yeah. My dad always mulches the tree because he's got a mulcher and there's so many Fargo jokes that I make. And he's like, it's just wood. Stop doing a Minnesota accent. It's a beautiful day. It's a beautiful day. Another number here is 85%. 85. That's the approximate amount of a conifer needle that is made of a complex polymer called

lignocellulose. I love eating some lignocellulose. Tell me why I should not. It turns out people are turning it into food. I know you're kidding. I just immediately, anytime Alex says a chemical, I say I want to eat it. So apparently I'm right sometimes. Right. Unlike WD-40, go for it.

Drink up. Did we decide I'm not allowed to eat that? I forgot. I think we did. I got to make some calls. Hang on. Yeah. Lignocellulose is rich in carbohydrates and a team at the University of Sheffield in the UK is experimenting with turning that into an artificial sweetener.

Ooh, that sounds good. Maybe. I don't know. Pine, would it have sort of a pine flavor or would it just taste sugary? It depends what they do. There's another example of somebody making something out of it. It's a distillery in the country of Estonia. Alice Obscurus says they're turning tree needles into a bitter mixer for cocktails.

It's like a soda. Apparently the needles especially of the kinds of conifers we use for Christmas trees are edible if you break them down right or use them right. And in 2020, a cook in the UK named Julia George-Alice wrote an entire cookbook of recipes to make out of Christmas tree parts. Ooh. Wait, there's multiple parts? Basically just the needles. That makes a lot of sense. Alex is getting an idea for a stump stew.

I'm still running a scam to sell stumps to people. Still now, I'm using a media platform to do it. You get enough stumps and a pie, you put some stock in there, you got yourself a stump stew. Yeah. Look, I'm pushing stump coin and it's because it's the future of money. I didn't just write a dollar sign with a sharpie on a stump. It's actually a very powerful cryptocurrency. Trying to jam it into a vending machine, get in there. So yeah, so that's a new but exciting other recycling of the living trees. There's basically good ways to use both kinds, which is good news. Awesome.

I love that. The next number is about 15,000, because there are about 15,000 Christmas tree farms in the United States. That's a lot of farms. I reckon that there's even more Christmas trees. Yeah, it was very hard to find good stats about living Christmas tree sales. They're basically all from industry groups and it's confusing. But in general, tens of millions of trees get sold every year.

And apparently people in the US simply found their tree in the woods early on and then started farming them in the early 1900s. That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, I have briefly looked into the effects of Christmas tree farming because on one hand, yeah, when you plant trees, it is potentially a good thing. But because so many of these trees are like younger trees, it is not necessarily as good as say like if you have an old growth forest that you let grow for a long time and

then like occasionally chop down some of the trees. Yeah, these are basically more ecologically positive than other uses of the land if we already chopped down the old forest that's there. So they're fine and also exciting in some ways. Oh, exciting. Because the next number here is about eight to 10 years. Eight to 10 years is how long it takes for a farmed tree to produce a choppable and sellable household Christmas tree when you're farming them. Takes about eight to 10 years. Usually those farms

only chop down a portion of their crop each year and leave about 90% of it standing to keep growing. I wonder how they decide when to chop them, how many to leave to grow bigger. Cause like, I assume the market for giganto Christmas trees is pretty small and yet very pricey, right? Cause you got a giganto Christmas tree and say like 30 Rockefeller Plaza or something that's probably gonna cost quite a bit of money. Yeah.

It's curious to me like what, how they determine which trees to cut down, how many of each size to cut down. That actually gets us into the first two takeaways. Both of those things. Very exciting. We'll start with takeaway number one. Some household Christmas trees are the top portion of a plant that continues living. That's, that's dope, I love that. So you just give it, you take the trees to like a barber.

They're like a little off the top and then yeah, and then you get your little Christmas tree. Yeah, I think all of us have a mental picture of they chop down an entire eight foot tall tree and then that's your Christmas tree. But a lot of farms use an ancient silviculture practice. Silviculture is the farming of trees and forests. That sounds, that sounds like a wood elf thing. Silviculture.

It really does. I was very excited about that term reading about this stuff. And they use an ancient practice. One name for it is coppicing, which is where you keep chopping off the top of a tree and letting its stump and root system remain alive and grow a next top. That's so cool. I love that. It's really cool. That's very cool. That seems much more sustainable than just chopping down trees every, like the whole tree every year.

Yeah. And it's part of how some of these farms just leave their original trees planted for many decades even, without constantly redoing the whole thing. And they let that root system really thrive. That's fantastic. I love that. I feel good about that.

Like I felt really good about creating my like frond tree because I feel more like I'm taking sort of tree beard shavings rather than a whole, like a dead tree that I've murdered. I'm not saying, and again, I'm not saying it's wrong to have a tree that you murdered in your living room. Great to hear that. Cause now I feel like when you do get like a Christmas tree

from a Christmas tree lot, that's not always gonna be like a murdered tree. It's going to be like the top of a tree that you have. And that's just its haircut. You're just getting its like sort of fingernail clippings. Yeah. And we'll talk about the whole history of Christmas trees later in the show, but throughout the history of Christmas trees, people have criticized it as killing trees unnecessarily. Either way, this is an exciting wrinkle to all that, where the tree doesn't have to die to generate a Christmas tree in your house.

Key sources here are a piece for Modern Farmer magazine by Paige Lindell, also a piece for Smithsonian magazine by Aula Katznielsen. This practice has a few names because there's a few variations in how to do it. It's called coppicing. It's also called stump culture. It's also called re-sprout silviculture. Alex is super into stump culture. We're not going to explore the entire history of people doing this. The short version is that we think people have done it with many tree species going back thousands of years. It's not super new technology, but people can do it with species of trees that have huge root systems and high tolerance of drought in addition to just the ability to do this. Most Christmas

tree species like spruce and firs fit that description. They can do it. Nice. That's fantastic. I like that. Yeah. In the U.S. this got going in the 1940s, a Christmas tree farmer in Western Massachusetts named Linwood Leisure started doing it. Oh, come on. Stop. Stop it. It's an incredible name. Linwood Leisure? Yeah. His last name spelled L-E-S-U-R-E, it's missing an I, but I think it's pronounced leisure.

Come on, no. He found that if you chop down a Christmas tree, but leave behind a high stump up to about knee height with a few branches still from the bottom level of branches. The remaining portion grows a whole new top. And then what you chopped looks like a Christmas tree. It's the right height and vibe perhaps. I hadn't really thought of it, but yeah, we don't get just, we don't, when we have a Christmas tree, there's no roots attached.

But it depends certainly on the tree, right? Not all trees would be able to tolerate such a trauma of being mostly decapitated. Yeah. And don't try this at your house or whatever. It needs to be done the right way to a tree to not just kill it. Yeah. You got to, like, calm down tree. It's okay.

Listen. Yeah, it's also one of those things where conifers have a lot of low branches, right? Like, if you have a maple or something, the branches are probably pretty high. And so it wouldn't make sense to try to do this. But there's that very low, long set of branches. If you leave some of those behind for photosynthesis, that helps a lot.

And there's some methods of this where they can truly just cut it down to a stump and it still bounces back and generates new tops. That's nuts. Trees are nuts. It's amazing. And you have no idea it's happening when you're just at the Christmas tree lot. Imagine if someone cut you down to the stumps and then you just grew a whole new Alex out of that. That's true stump culture. That's what I'm shooting for, you know? Someday.

Someday one of my feet will make a whole new bait. Yeah, someday you can just cut you off at the feet though like sort of like brush some gloop on you, some rigid or a little gloop, and there'll be two whole new Alex's from each foot. Oh no, I have too many feet, this is a problem. We'll both be on a rooftop pointing guns at each other. That's how it works. Yeah, I don't know who's real, neither do I.

And then you shoot each other. Yeah. And then they have to grow more Alex's. Why? And then you shoot each other. Yeah. And then they have to grow more Alex's. Yeah. And so this is apparently not how the majority of Christmas trees are farmed, but a significant percentage are farmed this way.

Millions of Christmas trees happen this way. And Modern Farmer points out that the US is more drought prone than ever. In 2022, 44% of the land in the contiguous 48 states in DC experienced moderate drought or worse. A stump cultured tree, you leave behind the entire mature root system that's more likely to survive a drought than fresh plantings. So this might be how we do it even more in the future. My understanding of complex root systems is that they also help raise the water table and also prevent erosion. So it seems like a good thing to keep intact regardless of just growing more of the tree as well.

Exactly. And Christmas tree farming is basically the second best use of the land it's usually done on because it used to just be a forest and that would have been the best. But if we're going to bother doing Christmas trees, it's usually done on land that is not a place we'll grow a different crop or build some huge development or something. And they tend to be grown in hilly or mountainous places. That's where most of the farming happens. The top two states for US Christmas tree farming

are Oregon and North Carolina because they separately have a lot of hilly and mountainous temperate zones where Christmas trees grow really well. Those stump cultured ones especially hold together that elevated land in a good way. It's wild how evergreen trees can grow in a lot of weird circumstances. Like have you ever been up the mountains and you've seen those trees just kind of growing diagonally out of a mountainside? Yeah.

It's incredibly impressive. They're very good at living. That's part of why we can cut most of their top off and they're like, okay, I'll be back in a few years. Fine. Great. You know what? I'll come back even a few years. Fine. Great. You know what? I'll come back even better and stronger than ever.

We better hope these trees don't understand revenge. Just like Christmas tree holding a chain, so I'm going like, let's see if you know how to grow back. Yeah. Another environmental thing is Christmas tree farms are good at supporting a whole little ecosystem. Apparently, a 2013 study found that a Christmas tree farm in North Carolina had 80 different plant species thriving in and around the trees, in particular milkweed plants that attracted

17 different genera of bees. That's very good for pollinators also. A lot of tree farms can have plants that attract predators for the insects that would be pests to the trees. So they can use a limited amount of pesticides. And they also want to use limited pesticide because these trees go in houses and like kids touch them and nibble on them and stuff. So they tend to use very little poison on them. Yeah. I would straight up put those. When I was a kid, I put everything in my mouth. Tree branches in my mouth. Dirt in my mouth.

Yeah. It's just what kids do. Ornament right in the mouth. Yeah, it's true. That's good. Because I know like, borer beetles can be an issue for trees. If you have a healthy tree that has a lot of sap, it's going to help keep it safe from beetles. And especially if you have insectivores that are out and about, like birds and various other critters who do enjoy a good bug, Timon and Pumbaa. Yeah, you got yourself a healthy tree. Yeah. And so I truly find it mind blowing that they can do this on a Christmas tree

farm and leave behind like the rest of your tree might be still alive on the farm. You know what I mean? That's amazing. That's so cool. That's fantastic. I love that. And we have a few more numbers here. The next number is 1931. 1931 is when construction workers set up the first Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Hey, there's that famous tree that we know and love. Yeah. And its origin is a lot more heartwarming to me than I expected.

Cause today it's this mainstream media spectacle where like, it feels like they're trying to- More like lame stream media, Alex. Ha ha! Woo! Got him. Got him. Got him.

Cause it always feels to me like it's trying to be the universe center of Christmas in a corporate way. Like they're trying to have the absolute biggest tree ever conceived and sell advertisements on it. Yeah. Like instead of ornaments, there's just like, this is the Aflac billboard hung from the tree.

Yeah. Like Jake from State Farm is on wires and like the upper third of it, just that person. Yeah. He's like on the top third of it, just that person. Yeah. He's on the top of the tree, the topper. Yeah. Yeah. Also, speaking of the topper, one source here is sixsquarefeet.com, which is an amazing website about New York City real estate and culture.

They say that the modern latest topper for the tree is a Swarovski crystal star weighing 900 pounds. That's a lot of pounds. More than 400 kilos. They've got to make sure that thing doesn't fall down. That squished someone right to pieces. Yeah, and they've gotten a bigger one every few years too. It's just an escalating opulence and wealth and power kind of thing. It's just going to bend the tree at some point.

Like Charlie Brown's tree. Oh, it wraps around to being good. Great. Well, I don't know if I'd say that, but yeah, it'd be like if Charlie Brown's tree was instead of a symbol of how something humble can be greater when you put enough love into it, how something incredibly ostentatious can collapse under its own weight. Yeah, that's fair. And the thing is this started very humbly and organically because in 1931, they had

just started constructing Rockefeller Center. It was basically a big empty lot in Manhattan. 1931 is the height of the Great Depression in the United States. Winter in New York is always cold and a little bit gray. To raise their spirits, the construction workers bought themselves a Christmas tree and put it up in the lot. Oh, I love that. They pooled bits of money from their paychecks and bought a 20-foot tall fir tree. The main photo we have of it is the worker's boss giving them their paycheck in front of

their little tree. And like two years later, a publicist for the corporation owning the building that they were working on realized, hey, we can put up a tree as publicity. They did the first lighting ceremony in 1933. Today, it's a massive capitalist spectacle, but 1931, it was just workers caring about each other and trying to make the Great Depression a little happier. Hey, these workers have a great idea. Let's monetize that and profit from it. Exactly. yeah.

Yeah, I was thinking about that actually, because here in Turin, there's a lot of places now putting their trees up, but a lot of the trees that are going up are, sure, there's a lot of private businesses putting their trees up, and a lot of small businesses, like a local baker,

putting a tree outside his bakery, which I think is cool and awesome. But then there's also a lot of public spaces where it seems like the trees are being put out by the city. So like in various piazzas, there's like a whole forest of trees going up in a few piazzas where it's just, it's really cool. I really love it. But yeah, I was thinking about that because it's like, this isn't really, it's just, it's really cool. I really love it. But yeah, I was thinking about that. Cause it's like, this isn't really, it's not as far as I know, it's not like sponsored by any company. It's just the city going like, yeah, we can put some trees out, why not?

And it's, it's very fun. It is. And that fits these next numbers and takeaway too. Cause next number is 2017. That's the year when people in Rome gave their city's large public Christmas tree an insulting nickname. They made fun of it. Oh yeah. I actually know this. I know about, well, I know the tree. I've seen it before. Oh, good. Okay. Yeah. And I don't know if it's been this way in further years, but 2017, the city of

Rome put up a 72 foot tall Norway spruce. Locals said it looks patchy, it looks bare, it lacked the full robust needles that make a good Christmas tree. And they nicknamed the tree Spelacho, which translates to mangy. Yeah. Like bald. You can't believe the Christmas tree. Yeah, baldy the Christmas tree. That's funny. Yeah. When I went there, I felt like it was a pretty decent looking tree.

So maybe it was just that one year's tree that was pretty scrungly looking. Yeah. And it turns out this happens a lot of years in a lot of big cities all over the world because takeaway number two, a lot of big public Christmas trees in big cities are a suboptimal tree species. Oh, whoa. Yeah. Also, I'm looking at this, this black, you know, and it is a little bit. Yeah. It's pretty scrangly.

It's great. Yeah, it's not the greenest. They're not just mean. They are making a point. Yeah. Then the whole city feels embarrassed, right? It's like, why is this kind of bear brown thing our tree? What? Yeah. Similar criticism happens with London's big tree in 2019 and also New York's Rockefeller Center in 2019.

And it's because many of these big cities choose the tallest Norway spruce that they can find. It's usually a wild grown spruce. At Christmas tree farms, they do a lot of pruning just to also help the trees grow in a pretty shape. Wild grown tree, they don't. They're just like, that's huge. Chop it down, put it on a truck, get it to the downtown. I don't know. Because I feel like I'm about those thick trees, the thick and luscious trees. I don't think it has to be tall. I think it could just be thick as a bowl of oatmeal.

I agree and cities feel the opposite. It's like a, it's a very almost phallic thing. It's like, it just has to be the tallest. It has to be like skyline mentality. That's just, that's, listen, it's not not it's not the size of the tree that matters. It's how you use it. That's right. Austin Powers or his dad.

I forget which of them says this, but I trust them. Yeah, I don't know. I think it was Michael Kide. Yeah, say how you feel about the Dutch. Then I'll know which character you are. I like how you recognized I was doing Austin, like started out doing an Austin Powers and then gave up midway through. And Austin Powers 3 specifically, yes.

Yeah, great. And yeah, it turns out the Norway Spruce species can be a great like regular tree in your house and is not so good for this giant public spectacle thing. According to Don Leopold, who's a professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, the Norway spruce is, quote, probably the single worst species for this purpose. Mean, rude, geez. And it's several issues. They have a naturally droopy shape. They easily shed needles.

They need consistent sunlight on all their branches. So if it's a really tall tree, the upper woods can shade the lower ones into being scraggly. And they also don't have a great shelf life after being chopped. I'm able to kind of see that looking at these photos. Yeah, I'm not that mad at the Romans. The tree doesn't look great. No, they pretty much called it. What the cities are doing is saying, we'll have the tallest tree in the world, but then

it's a tree that immediately kind of falls apart after it's been chopped. And it takes some weeks to get it, especially to Manhattan. And so then it just kind of falls apart on the way. In your home, you can do stuff to make a Norway Spruce last longer. You can do a fresh cut off of the bottom of the trunk. You can put it in a water dish, but like this giant tree, they would need some series of cranes to do it or something.

Like they just don't. According to Donald Leopold, lots of other species would work better, in particular the balsam fir. But a balsam fir can only grow to about 40 feet high. So Rome wanted... Oh, they're beautiful. It's gorgeous, but Rome said this Norway spruce is about 30 feet taller. So we want tall against all other considerations. Rockefeller Center at one point achieved a hundred foot tree, but it's this kind of scraggly Norway spruce. It doesn't look as good.

And so like big cities keep doing this pissing contest of size against the aesthetics. And that'll probably keep happening. That's such a... Who's making these decisions? Because I think if it was up to people like if you Showed it to trees side by side one. That's like bigger But looks like it got like smashed around by a giant cat for an hour Versus like a smaller one that's lush and green and has full branches. I feel like everyone would like the latter. So

why do they keep insisting on this? It's like so that they can like make the news of like tallest tree and it just looks like absolute garbo. I feel like it's a comparing to last year issue. Like if the tree is smaller the next year, your regulars will be like what happened? Our city's broke. Even though it would be a better tree. I feel like if it's smaller, but it's fuller and lusher and like, you know what? Like if you do some cool light effects with the tree, maybe even make like an animatronic tree that's like, hello, I'm John Christmas.

And like, you know, I think there's a lot of ways that you could do cool tree stuff without just being like taller, taller, taller. It truly is that situation. You just should get a great tree that you love instead of going all out for one extra foot of height in a way that people don't even register really. Yeah. That kind of leads into our next takeaways, but folks we've done a ton of numbers and two big takeaways. We'll get into those other takeaways under the Christmas tree after this quick break.

["The Christmas Tree"] Oh my gosh, hi, it's me, Dave Holmes, host of Troubled Waters, the pop culture battle to the ego death. Okay, everybody, word association with Troubled Waters, first one to fumble loses, go. Comedy. Panel show. Guests. Celebrities.

Games. Oh, sound rounds. Improvised speeches. Puns disguised as trivia. Um, a very niche Flash Gordon clip. Um, Javel Rowan. Ah, no, Riley, I'm sorry, she will not return our phone calls. I am afraid you're out.

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For our next topic, we're talking Fiona, the baby hippo from the Cincinnati Zoo. I hate this little hippo. We're back and with Christmas history because takeaway number three. German Protestants created both kinds of Christmas trees and modern Germany. trees and modern Germany. Alex is trying to play it really cool, but during the break, whoops, I put on a pair of reindeer antlers that go over my headphones, but then they fell off just now. And I just want you to- The moment you started speaking about them, they were like, I'm out.

I'm out. I'm out of here. So Alex has been, is really trying to be very, he's being very professional, but I'm less so. Okay, well they fell off again. We're leaving them, they're off to do some Christmas stuff. So, all right, Christmas trees created Germany is what you were saying. Yeah, It turns out that artificial trees came along not that long after living trees in the house and played a big role in the creation of a unified Germany because before the late 1800s,

there were a bunch of tiny kingdoms of German speakers instead of Germany. And Austria has been a country a long time, but unifying a Germany was partly boosted by Christmas trees. Wow. So everyone was like, wait, you've got a tree in your house too? I guess we're not so different after all. Yeah, that's what Protestants and Catholics said to each other at one point in German history. I was joking. Is that true?

Yeah, this was mainly a Protestant thing and Catholics almost rejected it for a long time. But then as sort of a German national identity forms, it was one way Catholics could participate in that while also staying separate from the Protestants still and not converting or whatever. I see. Oh, that's so, so it was like, hey, yes, we have our extremely marginal differences in our religions that we fought bitter and bloody wars about. However, we both like to put a nice tree indoors here and again. Yeah.

And you see like across Europe in the 1800s, people also think that Germany is the country that really does Christmas, right? And one of the big reasons is beautiful Christmas trees. People are like, that's the Christmas country right there. Like that's it. Now that's a Christmas. Yeah, yeah.

Lederhosen and trees and beer and pretzels. Ooh, you can hang a bunch of Bavarian pretzels on the limbs of a Christmas tree. Why not? Sounds great. Why not? Yeah. Yeah, and this takeaway is also pretty much just the origin of Christmas trees, which

you can find a lot of bloggy stuff on the internet about. The key sources here are two books. One is called The Battle for Christmas, a Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday. That's written by Steven Nissenbaum, who's a UMass Amherst Professor of History. And the other book is Christmas in Germany, a Cultural History. That's by Joe Perry, who's a Georgia State University Associate Professor of German and European History. They both say that Christmas trees first come from German-speaking Protestants in the early 1600s. It's a lot more complicated

than that. There's roots before it and it doesn't get really going until after that. Early 1600s Protestant Germans gave us Christmas trees. All right. So what are we like before Christmas came before the trees? Yes? But did we use trees in sort of different traditions before pre-Christmas? Yes. So Christmas is a pretty old holiday. It did take some centuries after Jesus's death to have Christian churches create a Christmas holiday at all, and also set a date in December for it. And there's still not alignment among world Christians about when Christmas even is. The Russian Orthodox Church celebrates it in early January and some other churches do it at other times.

But the Catholic Church in particular, the traditional decoration for Christmas was a creche, also known as a nativity scene. You'd put up a little diorama of the people and animals in Jesus's birth instead of a tree. Yeah, I've seen those. I've seen Star Wars versions of those. I've seen marshmallow peep versions of those. There's a lot of those around. Simpsons. Yeah, it's fun on the internet, but it turns out that like most Catholics for, you know, like a thousand years or so, they would just put up their little set of nativity stuff and say, great, we decorated for Christmas.

Like we did it. There was no tree. That's actually pretty common here in Italy where it's like an entire little like Christmas village that you create out of miniatures. So like these, there are these really, really extravagant miniatures displays that are amazing. I love them. And sometimes people will just put this whole thing up in their home instead of doing a tree or maybe plus a small tree. But that's a big thing still in Italy. Yeah. And yeah, that is kind of the other thing,

but secondary thing in the United States, I feel like. You'll see a big public nativity outside of a church, but most people's houses, they do a tree and then maybe a nativity. It's sort of optional. Yeah. There's also, especially online, people will say, Christmas trees are actually German pagan stuff. And that's not really the origin of this, but there was a Yule festival with a decorated Yule tree in some ancient places that are now Germany. Many cultures also did some kind of festival around the winter solstice in the Northern hemisphere that's December 21st or 22nd usually. So there are like old things that kind of

rhyme with this, but it's not why a bunch of people did Christmas trees. Right. So we had, we had sort of precedents that were like sort of similar traditions or at least like the concept of like doing fun stuff with trees was around, but it wasn't like we had straight up Christmas trees before this. That's right.

And the other claim you'll see out there is that Martin Luther created it. And this really starts a few generations after him. He dies in 1546. But also his work's a big influence because he starts the big Protestant Reformation, especially in Germany. Luther's example, he inspires people

to tinker with every part of Christian life. He translates the Bible out of Latin into the local language German. He marries a woman. So then people say, okay, we made the Bible our language, our clergy can marry. What else maybe do we change? And a few Protestant people try Christmas trees. And the earliest written record of one is 1604. And they were like, it's super dope to have a tree inside. You don't even have to go outside to see a tree. Guys.

At last. And this written record, it's very, very regional and local. It's mainly in the city of Strasbourg, which is in France, but it's right on the border. It has a long history of German influence and sometimes being part of countries like Prussia. There's a written record in 1604 about the Protestants in Strasbourg bringing conifers into their house, decorating them with, quote, roses made of colored paper, apples, wafers, tinsel, sweet meats, etc. The odd thing is this regional phenomenon in Strasbourg and a couple

other Protestant German speaking communities, that's not the origin of the trend. It takes almost 200 more years for it to get really popular. And it also gets rejected by some people in its little communities. We have a 1657 record of a Protestant clergyman in Strasbourg named Johann Conrad Dahnauer, who wrote a book criticizing Christmas trees, saying they, quote, often overtake the word of God or holy observances, end quote. Were people so crazy about these trees that they're like, I don't remember God or Jesus anymore.

I'm more into this tree, dude. Have you seen this tree that I have? Let me again, it's in my house. It's not outside in the forest. It's in my house. What? Yeah. This really, to me, matches the later opinion of giving kids presents makes it materialistic

instead of religious. That was people's initial feeling about Christmas trees. This is taking us away from devout thinking about Jesus and his meaning, even though today it's very standard. Yeah. You're not supposed to have fun when you think about Jesus. You're supposed to sit in an empty room and be sad. Yeah, and this fits some other Protestant groups like the Puritans who came to North

America who just banned Christmas. They said like, it's too much of a party. It takes us away from faith. It's so fitting that our country was founded by Grinches. At least that means Max was here early on. Oh, I love Max the dog. He's so great. When he puts that big old deer horn on him and he tips over because he's too small, so

he's got his saw. That's too big for him. So his butt is heavy enough to counterbalance the antler. Yeah. And so this kind of thing limited Christmas trees' popularity to being very niche, very regional, almost more an Eastern French thing than a German thing. It took all the way until the late 1700s for them to get really popular. There's three reasons they got more popular, really spread across all of Germany and became distinctively German. One reason is just industrialization begins. It was expensive and difficult to have a Christmas tree. It takes a lot of space and resources, and so industrialization made

that easier. Wait, how did industrialization make it easier to get a tree? There was just more money and resources and stuff for people's lives in general. It's like a very general broad increase in wealth. Yeah. All right. The second reason is artificial trees. People invent this in the late 1700s. Oh, I would have thought I would. That's so early, I feel like. Especially being an artificial tree kid. I love learning that, that it's like pretty early in the history. It's not, you assume it's from like the 1950s.

Right. And a tail fin Cadillac person, but it's not. It's really old. So what did they make these artificial trees out of at the time? They made them out of wire and bird feathers. Oh, I can see that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because especially if you like eat a goose

and you're the 1700s person doing your own food, you just have feathers. They would attach them to wire and either paint that green or just leave it the feather color and make a little artificial tree. I know I want to kill a goose and turn it into a tree. No, I won't kill a goose. But yeah, what about a tree man at a peacock feathers? I bet that exists. That sounds really luxurious though. Yeah. People did like creative versions of trees for all the reasons that we have artificial trees today. Then you're set. You don't have to keep getting one every year. So that was the second reason is it just got easier that way. And then the third reason is nationalism.

Because all over Europe, cultures spent the past several centuries thinking about, should we be a bigger political entity? What makes our language and art and culture distinctive? And in 1771, a major German writer is thinking about that when he discovers Christmas trees. In 1771, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who we usually just call Goethe in English speaking places, he visits Strasbourg and he falls in love with all of what he feels is Germaness there, including Christmas trees.

Oh, wow. So people were really brought together in terms of a national identity, not by like a military or a specific food or a religion, but just like trees, man, In your house. The leading thing is definitely the language, but then yeah, it was stuff like Christmas trees and some foods and unfortunately, like the Prussian military was kind of a cultural part of it. But, but Gerda writes a book in 1774 after this trip called The Sorrows of Young Werther and it's a massive hit. Oh yeah, I read that. Oh, apparently there's a Christmas tree scene in it.

I haven't read it, but that's what the sources say. I don't remember. I remember Werther being real whiny because he was sad. Some girl didn't like him, so he was sad the whole time. And he was, I read it in college and we did some kind of poetry contest about it. I don't remember why, but I won some Werther's Originals candies.

No, really? Yeah, because we were reading. That's a great bit. Oh, it's really funny. Yeah, because our professor was like, all right, I've got a special prize for you because of your poem. And yeah, it was Werther's Originals. Yeah, there you go. Great.

Yeah. Yeah. And the thrust of this search for Germanness is that Germans do what many cultures have done, which is invent some new traditions to bind them together and also invent a belief that it's old. Not to get too dark, but that is also a characteristic of nationalism and fascism, where it's this like you create a new rebirth that is like both a new national identity while you're also kind of pretending that it's really old when it's not. Yes. And I'll link about it in like a very minor way.

Christmas trees played into Nazi ideology, but it's not the driving thing. I don't think you should be sad about Christmas trees. They just did that with everything. And this was also a little bit religious and so. Yeah. Yeah. Now that makes sense to me. So Germans took this relatively new idea, but they said Strasburg's been doing it for a long time. And also they said there's this old Yule tree, let's just pretend we got the idea from there in a way that we're not like fooling anybody, we just want this to be true.

For the rest of German history, Christmas trees become a unifying force where this really spreads across Protestants in Northern Germany, and then Catholics in southern Germany can adopt a Christmas tree to feel German without having to drop their religion. And apparently, you know, Germany knits together as a country, but it takes a long time still for Catholics in general to have Christmas trees. According to Joe Perry, it took until after World War I for Catholics in the German countryside to put up Christmas trees. I had no idea even though I grew up Catholic, it took a while for the Vatican to have Christmas

trees and the official Catholic church to bother using them. Apparently the first Vatican Christmas tree was in 1982. Oh, okay. So that's pretty recent. Yeah. And it's partly because the relatively new pope was Polish. Pope John Paul II's, you know, Poland's just connected to Germany in a way that previous Italian popes were not.

And so it was also like kind of his childhood stuff. Tree pope. We got a tree pope. All this, it's relevant to our very last takeaway number four. Christmas trees spread worldwide because the UK banned Catholics from being their monarch. The British royal family, because of a religion choice, became more and more and more German. And then that helped springboard Christmas trees to be global instead of just German.

What was that? That wasn't the William of Orange thing, was it? It was right after him, basically. Key source here is this book, also a piece by Troy Bickham, professor of history at Texas A&M University. If folks know a little bit of English history, they might know there are many centuries of fighting over which Christian denomination, the king or queen should be. In 1701, after many centuries of violence and backstabbing, and shortly after a glorious revolution where they brought in Dutch monarchs just to keep it Protestant, the monarchy and the parliament passed a law called the Act of Settlements that said nobody Catholic can inherit the throne. Just explicitly, no Catholics.

No Catholics allowed. That's pretty mean to Catholics. And it was a very specific intervention for one succession because the monarch Queen Anne had no obvious heir. She had one set of distant relatives who were Catholic, but they didn't want them to take over. So they replaced them with a set of distant Protestant relatives called the House of Hanover. And they're named that because they rule Hanover in Germany. I see. Did they not want the Catholic relatives because they were Catholic or because they didn't

like those other relatives? Both, but mainly the religion thing. Yeah. I see. Okay. So then they got them the Ohanovers, which is definitely not what they were referred to. But- Yeah. Hanover is a Dutchie in Germany. They're just named after being German.

And so those Hanovers brought trees with them? Yes. This sparked 300 years of a mostly German English royal family that is mostly marrying other Germans. Because in order to fit this act of settlement, you pretty much need both parents of the next heir to be Protestant. Because if they have even one Catholic parent, that's a Catholic vibe and they can't rule. And in order to have like a diverse gene pool, these German places are perfect because it's a bunch of tiny little duchies that each have their own nobles. And so the English could get a lot of different

genes relatively into the family. Hmm. Okay. You mean a bunch of different leader husbands into the family because I don't believe that would be the more appropriate trouser wear of the Germans. And little green hat and suspenders, right? And yeah, the House of Hanover was like really German. England's King George I and George II both spoke German as their first language. So then these English royals were putting up Christmas trees because that's German family stuff of the 1700s. It's kind of gotten around, especially to rich people who can afford it. So then that became the cool thing to do in England as well, I'm assuming, because everyone

wants to be like the king and the queen and get Christmas trees and marry your cousin. Yeah, every part. Mass media makes it really take off with Queen Victoria, who takes the throne in the 1830s and an 1848 illustration of her whole family enjoying a Christmas tree becomes like the most popular picture on earth for a little while and spreads the idea. Wow. I got to see this picture. It's like very glowy and she's

pretty and you know it's good. Yeah, yeah I see. They're like... Yeah we'll link it. Yeah it's they're standing around a Christmas tree, big puffy outfits and the tree is like kind of glowing like it's radioactive and maybe it is we don't know but yeah you know it's nice. I don't really understand why this is like a global sensation, this picture, but you know, it does exude a certain Christmassy warmth. Yeah, and it dovetailed with one other thing, which would be for a whole separate episode about Christmas traditions. Christmas was a relatively rowdy holiday before the 1830s in places like Europe.

Rowdy. Christmas was a relatively rowdy holiday before the 1830s in places like Europe. People would party outdoors and there's bonfires and drinking and stuff, at least some places. Did we make Christmas boring because of Queen Victoria? Around the 1830s, English speakers start saying, what if we reform Christmas to be more of a cozy nuclear family holiday? They realized one of the best ways to do that is a Christmas tree that can't go out and party. You like will sit the kids in front of it and gather and be be religious. Okay, but what if you put a pot on a skateboard and you put sunglasses on your tree and you're

like me and John Christmas are going out for some hard nog. Come on, Giovanni, let's do this. Let's do this. We're going to nog it up tonight, Christmas tree. In the 1830s, in a way, even somewhat separate from Germany, reformers in the US and the UK start pushing this. It dovetails with pictures of Queen Victoria doing it. And that's really when Christmas trees get going in the US and a lot of the rest of the world. Apparently,

we think some of the first US Christmas trees were a couple of German immigrant families in Pennsylvania in the 1810s. But the real spark is upper middle class waspy people liking British stuff and peaceful family time. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess it kind of makes sense that you would want to make your family stand around a tree rather than go out. And I'm not really sure what they did for Christmas before then. If you were a fancy family, maybe like throw Holly at the poor?

It's just like relatively new all around. It was just kind of a mass or a service for Jesus's birth. And then maybe you have a crash or some other like specific stuff you do. But we're like less than 200 years into American Christmas tree commercial Christmas. It's relatively new all across the board. But I like that for our Christmas trees. You can do what you want. It's not like 2000 years old. Yeah, do what you want.

Could be a tree made out of feathers. Could be a tree made out of plastic. Could be a tree made out of smaller trees that you've grafted onto one big tree. So it's sort of like a tree Megatron. Yeah. Megatrine. Megatree.

Megatree. Megatree. Mary Trimus, everybody. Megatrimus. Megatrimus, everybody. And to all, a good tree. Yeah, then our sleigh flies toward the moon. That's how we enter. Yeah. Yeah, then our sleigh flies toward the moon. That's how we answer.

Yeah. Sound of a rocket taking off. Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, some household Christmas trees are the top portion of a plant that continues living. Takeaway number two, a lot of big public Christmas trees are the tallest possible Norway spruce at the expense of every other aesthetic feature

take away number three German Protestants created both kinds of Christmas trees in the process of inventing an idea of Germany take away number four Christmas trees spread worldwide because the UK banned Catholics from being their monarch. And then so many stats and numbers about the botany of living Christmas trees, the environmental logic of artificial trees, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists.

So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is Christmas tree schemes in the US and the UK and the Koreas. Visit safpod.fun for that bonus show for a library of almost 19 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Also, you can go to maximumfun.org who backs this podcast operation. Also, you can go to maximumfund.org slash gift, or use the toggles in the menus of sifpod.fund. If you want to give somebody else the gift of a maximum fund membership, you can even time that for the exact date you want. But if it's about to be Christmas day and

you don't have something that can ship in time, I think a maximum fund membership is the perfect way to just digitally knock that out and support our show, support other shows on our network that we're so glad to be part of. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFund.org. Key sources this week include a couple of amazing books about the history of Christmas. It's pretty hard to find great digital resources on the history of Christmas traditions, but two books I want to recommend. One of them is The Battle for Christmas, a Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday. That's written by Steven Nissenbaum, U.S. Amherst Professor of History. The other book is Christmas in Germany, a Cultural History.

That is by Joe Perry, who's Georgia State University Associate Professor of German and European History. We did also find quite a few solid digital resources, especially U.S. Department of Agriculture Statistics on Christmas tree farming in this country, which speaks to the broader practice across the world. Some excellent Smithsonian Magazine material on the history of Christmas in this country, and 6squarefeet.com on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca.

I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIFT Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life.

There is a link in this episode's description to join that discord. We're also talking about this episode on the discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 22, that's about the topic of mayonnaise. Fun fact there, mayonnaise gets its name from French cooking and the Napoleonic wars and the Carthaginians. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my cohost Katie Goldin's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals,

science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Un-Shaven by the Boodos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. Thank you to all our listeners. And I'm thrilled to say

we're releasing something special next week. We will have a full live episode in bonus feeds. It's in bonus feeds because people paid a ticket price to hear it on the night we taped it. And we'll have a holiday message for you in the main feed. So we've got all that stuff for you and also just a holiday thank you. How about that? Talk to you then. Thanks for watching!